only
a printer theoretically, not practically.

I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard life; I
know all the palaver of that business: I know all about discovery
claims and the subordinate claims; I know all about lodes, ledges,
outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels,
tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz
mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with
quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to
reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion
into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to
hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot and
the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret
Harte introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his
miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the
phrasing by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not
by experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without
learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse.

I have been a surface miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries, and
the dialects that belongs with them; and whenever Harte introduces that
industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his characters that
neither he nor they have ever served that trade.

I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in any
but one little spot in the world, so far as I know. I know how, with
horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace it step by step
and stage by stage up the mountain to its source, and find the compact
little nest of yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the
ground. I know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that
fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who tries to
use it without having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor
of his hands.

I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them; and
whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without
having learned it at its source I can trap him always before he gets far
on his road.

And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to superintend
a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the matter down to a
single question--the only one, so far as the previous controversies
have informed me, concerning wh